Gen unleashed the **Sanguine Paradise**.
A bolt of blood-red lightning seemed to branch up his forearm from within, the essence of the Milky Beast Shelai flooding his meridians with a violent, purifying fire. The pain was immediate and immense—a searing regeneration that burned away fatigue and knit torn tissue at a cellular pace, leaving behind raw, humming power.
Well aware he was still at a disadvantage—wounded, exhausted—he attacked first. His figure blurred, not into a beam of light this time, but into a direct, explosive charge. He hurled his fist forward, a simple, powerful punch amplified by the savage energy now coursing through his arm.
The assassin blinked.
He didn't dodge. He raised his void-scythe in a wide, horizontal arc to meet the blow.
The impact was jarring.
Gen's punch didn't just connect. It obliterated the figure before him. There was no resistance. The scythe, the man, they simply vanished the moment his fist made contact, as if he'd punched a reflection on the surface of a lake. The force of his blow, meeting no opposition, discharged into the ground.
***BOOM!***
A massive crater erupted in the snowy field where the assassin had stood, sending plumes of white powder and dark earth geysering into the twilight sky.
Gen himself blinked twice, staggering from the unexpected lack of resistance. The raw power in his arm was startling. *Was it really this fast? This strong?*
Before the thought could fully form, a primal feeling—a cold tickle at the base of his skull—screamed at him.
He shifted sideways, yanking his head back.
A scythe flashed upward from the empty space beside him, its edge screeching as it tore the air apart, passing a hair's breadth above his nose.
The assassin pivoted from the missed strike and landed with eerie ease on the palm of a frost-rimed pine tree forty feet away. The scythe was steady in his hand. His earlier smile was gone, replaced by a flat, predatory focus. This was the mark of the real hunter.
Gen wiped a trickle of blood from his nose, his frown deep. "What was that?"
"Death," the assassin said.
He flickered again.
He appeared at Gen's left flank, low, the scythe sweeping upward in a vicious diagonal arc aimed to split him from hip to shoulder.
Gen shifted his lead leg, grinding it into the snow for purchase, and clapped his hands together, catching the scythe's shaft between his palms just below the blade. The impact sent a shockwave of numbing force up both his arms. But it was close enough.
His right hand, now free, pistoned downward in a hammer-fist aimed for the crown of the assassin's head.
*Got you,* Gen thought, the Sanguine Paradise's energy coiling in his shoulder. *Too close to dodge. This ends it.*
The assassin blinked.
Gen's hammer-fist struck nothing but empty air and ground.
***CRUMPH!***
Another crater bloomed, showering him with frozen dirt. In the same instant, the feeling of wrongness returned. The scythe, which he had just been gripping, was gone. A line of fire traced across the side of his neck.
Gen jumped twice back, his boots skidding in the snow. He clamped a hand to his neck, feeling the warm, slick flow of blood. A deep cut, not fatal, but bleeding freely. His head swam; the Sanguine Paradise's fierce energy warred with fresh blood loss, leaving him feeling weaker, unsteady.
The assassin appeared once more, this time leaning casually against a thick tree trunk on the opposite side of the clearing, as if observing the distant Damocles. "No one has ever understood how the **Clear Mirage** works," he said, his voice devoid of mockery now, stating a simple fact. "Do not bother trying. Death is the only option now that you have met me."
Gen narrowed his focus, forcing his breathing to slow, to become quiet. The ache in his neck was a sharp counterpoint to the dull roar of healing in his arm. He couldn't see it. He couldn't understand the movement. But it was familiar. It reminded him of the principle Varja had used against Nix—a profound application of the Wheels so complex it seemed to defy location itself. To evade it, he first had to *understand* it.
The assassin flickered forward. No more hit-and-run. He charged straight at Gen, not hiding his intent. His scythe condensed, dark energy concentrating into a single, piercing point at its tip, crackling with void-lightning. Clearly, he was ready to finish it.
Gen's world grew quiet. The panic subsided. Behind him, between his shoulder blades, the mark left by the Tower of Wonder began to pulse with a deep, warm heat. It wasn't pain. It was awareness. The gift of the Tower—the forced, painful expansion of perception—opened once more.
*Listen to the Wheel.*
The command was not his own. It was the Tower's final lesson.
He stopped trying to see the assassin. He listened.
He heard the *tap-tap-tap* of a boot on compacted snow, impossibly fast, but real.
He heard the *tear-hiss* of the scythe's edge parting the air molecules in its path.
He heard the dissonance—the sound of movement from one place, the sound of the weapon from slightly another.
And then it clicked.
The **Clear Mirage** was not a simple illusion. The assassin didn't disappear. He was *both* there and not there. He was using a mixture of Wheels—likely **Shidow** to bend light and sound, **Fendow** to separate his own presence from the space he occupied, **Zhidow** to create a fleeting, tangible after-image—to create a layered existence. The "real" him was always a half-step away from where your senses screamed he was. The moment you attacked the mirage, the real one struck.
It was a flawless defense against anyone who trusted their eyes.
Gen made a decision. A desperate, calculated gamble.
As the assassin's final charge reached its peak, the piercing scythe-tip aimed for Gen's heart, Gen did not try to block the mirage. He did not dodge.
He gave up his guard.
He turned his body slightly, presenting his left side.
The scythe, aimed at his heart, bit deep into the meat of his shoulder instead. The pain was a white-hot spear, driving the air from his lungs. He bit down on a scream, his teeth grinding.
But his left hand shot up, clamping over the scythe's shaft, pinning it in his own flesh.
His right hand came up, fingers splayed. He didn't strike at the air where the assassin appeared to be. He unleashed the principle of **Fendow** he had been grasping at since opening the Crown Acupoint. He pushed his will outward, not as an attack, but as a cleaving force—*separate the layers. Divide the mirage from the man.*
It was like tearing thick canvas with his bare hands. He felt the resistance, the screaming strain on his spirit.
The air around the scythe *rippled*.
The image of the assassin, fierce and focused, flickered like a bad reflection. Behind it, for a single, fractured second, Gen saw the real man—his eyes wide with shock, his body leaning forward from the thrust, overextended and utterly exposed.
It was too late for the assassin to blink away.
Gen's blood-slicked right hand, already moving, came up. His index finger touched the tip of the exposed assassin's forehead.
"**End of the World.**"
He did not shout. He breathed the words.
A point of silent, annihilating darkness blossomed at the contact.
"Impossible…" the assassin muttered, his voice full of a profound, final disbelief.
Then his figure dissolved into motes of nothingness, consumed from the point of contact outward. At the same moment, the void-scythe trapped in Gen's shoulder dissolved with its master, leaving a ragged, gushing wound.
The released energy hurled Gen sideways. He crashed back-first into the trunk of the pine tree with a sickening *thud*, then slumped to its roots. Splinters of wood rained down around him. Darkness crowded the edges of his vision. He was almost unconscious from the blow, from the pain, from the spiritual drain of using **Fendow** in such a precise, brutal way.
As the assassin's body crumbled to nothing, his final curse seemed to hang in the cold air. *How could you…*
Gen observed the dissolving figure without much thought. His analysis was cold, clinical, a barrier against the agony in his shoulder. *The Clear Mirage. A mixture of Wheels to create an image both illusion and real. It was too hard to discern with the eye or even with any other wheel alone. However Its lethality vanished the moment its true layer is touched, giving a brief window to act.* He'd gambled his life on that theory. He'd won.
He sighed, a cloud of steam in the freezing air. *That was close.*
Alive. He was alive, at least. Now covered in blood, sweat, and wood pulp, his left arm hanging useless, a deep puncture weeping life into his clothes.
Now he needed days. Rest. Recovery. Before resuming the journey to the Lost Triangle.
But could he really sleep here? In this state, in the open? He had no strength to build a shelter, to hide his trail. His consciousness was fraying. His shoulder slowly slumped. There was nothing he could do anyway. The fatigue, held back by adrenaline and the Sanguine Paradise, crashed over him like a black wave.
At the same moment, a warmth stirred against his hip.
The two eggs in his pocket—Muiyin and Mujiin—began to glow with a soft, internal light. They pulsed, as if reacting to his desperate, fading vitality.
A transparent film, like clarified oil, seeped from the eggs. It spread over Gen's body, coating him without weight or sensation. As it covered him, it began to paint him into the surroundings. His bloody tunic took on the pattern of the trampled snow and dark earth. His skin toned to match the grey bark of the pine. In moments, to any outside eye, he was gone—a seamless part of the landscape, a white-and-grey lump against the tree roots.
Unaware of all this, Gen Jiang, son of the fallen Immortal, gave in. His eyes closed. He did not fall asleep so much as he plunged, straight down, into a deep and absolute void of exhaustion.